Fugitiva y reina

by Violaine Huisman

Parisina y burguesa de adopción, maniaco depresiva, bailarina a pesar de su cojera, esposa libertina de marido aún más disoluto, Catherine Cremnitz fue, antes que nada, madre. Un verdadero «madremoto» arrollador para sus dos hijas, Elsa y Violaine, a quienes quiso con una ferocidad extrema, la misma con la que amó, luchó (contra su enfermedad y sus terribles traumas infantiles) y trató de enderezar su vida tantas veces. Ambientada en el París elegante de los años ochenta y noventa, Fugitiva y reina es un homenaje póstumo de una de sus hijas a su madre. Un texto crudo y hermoso, salpicado de humor negro, para exorcizar demonios y sobrellevar una culpa infantil y profunda: la de no haber logrado mantener a su madre con vida.

Genres: Fiction, France, Literary Fiction, Contemporary, Mental Health, Psychology, Womens

235 pages, Paperback

First published January 11, 2018

About the author

Violaine Huisman was born in Paris in 1979 and has lived and worked in New York for twenty years, where she ran the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s literary series and also organized multidisciplinary arts festivals across the city. Originally published by Gallimard under the title Fugitive parce que reine, her debut novel The Book of Mother was awarded multiple literary prizes including the Prix Françoise Sagan and the Prix Marie Claire.

Reviews

[Lisa of Troy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Captivating debut novel that is both sad and funny

Violaine has always known her mother, “Maman”, is not quite like the other mothers. Her mother is exquisitely beautiful but also highly passionate and unstable. The first section of the book details Violaine’s childhood, what it was like growing up with a mother suffering from mental illness. Once it has been firmly established that Maman might win the worst mother of the year contest, the book transitions to the life of Maman, and all of the streets traveled that went into creating the present-day Maman.

The Book of Mother hit quite a few of my favorite checkboxes: great prose, interesting, great storytelling, disability, and female characters. The author has an extensive vocabulary, and the writing was so extremely well developed especially for a debut novel. The storytelling was spot on, and The Book of Mother was quite a page turner. Maman was clearly mentally ill so the reader could never predict what she was going to do (other than we knew it was going to be a hot mess). The book did touch on how Maman was treated for her physical illness. This is an important discussion point for mental illness where more people would be receptive to treatment if they knew they would be treated humanely. The section of the book told from the viewpoint of Violaine was hilarious which was odd because it was also kind of sad. This led to a very unique reading experience which I thoroughly enjoyed.

A word of caution: There are some adult themes in this book that might be disturbing to some readers. The Book of Mother really reminded me of The Glass Castle which perfectly depicts how a child can unconditionally love an abusive parent. Both books are incredibly deep and moving.

Overall, if you are in the mood for a book that is very well written, unpredictable, sad yet funny, look no further.

*Thank you, Scriber from Simon & Schuster, for a free copy of this book in exchange for my fair and honest opinion. The audiobook was paid for by yours truly using Scribd.

2024 Reading Schedule
Jan Middlemarch
Feb The Grapes of Wrath
Mar Oliver Twist
Apr Madame Bovary
May A Clockwork Orange
Jun Possession
Jul The Folk of the Faraway Tree Collection
Aug Crime and Punishment
Sep Heart of Darkness
Oct Moby-Dick
Nov Far From the Madding Crowd
Dec A Tale of Two Cities

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[Adina · Rating 4 out of 5]

31.10.2022 Now Longlisted for Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2022

Longlisted for the Booker Prize international 2022.

Audiobook narrated by Tosca Hopkins
Translated from French by Leslie Camhi

I haven’t heard of the book before it was longlisted. I do not think many wishlists included this one so it was a surprise when it got nominated. A surprise which proved to be pleasant, at least for me.

The book is a fictionalized memoir of the author’s childhood and the biography of the tumultuous life of her mother, Catherine. Yes, it wants to be both a personal account and an imaginary life story sprinkled with some facts. I am not sure it worked that well to mix those two but it was good enough for the jury.

The novel is structured in 3 parts. The 1st part is the most personal, it makes up the memoir part of the story. Maybe because of its emotional element, it was also the part I enjoyed most. The 2nd part is the fictionalized short biography of Catherine dramatic life, her lovers, crazy lifestyle and mental health issues. The last part becomes again more personal and deals with the mother’s death. However, I do not feel it regained the quality and involvement from the reader as the 1st part.

It was an interesting novel, I think it deserved to be longlisted but it was enough, as the judges also decided.

The narration was convincing, the French words were well pronounced which is appreciated. It jars my ears when a narrator mispronounces foreign words or names.

[emma · Rating 4 out of 5]

a cool girl book if i've ever seen one.

my barnes & noble recently moved, and while this caused a level of devastation previously only recorded in the wake of natural disasters and in households without sweets, it did have one major perk: a little miracle called a "moving sale."

on one of the first days of the sale, i saw this book, which i had never (to my specific and bad recollection) heard of, and was for whatever magical reason so charmed that i hid it under a mountain of little known middle grade sequels and crossed my fingers it would wait until my turn.

it didn't, but i still found it in a moment of serendipity that would make john cusack jealous.

this was very good.

beautifully written, stark, evocative. extremely honest while being quite loving. i want to categorize this as nonfiction for how true and real it feels!

it's not a pleasant or easy reading experience, but it is a good one.

bottom line: three cheers for rom-com-style meet cutes but with books.

[Henk · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well written account on growing up with a mentally unstable mother who is both a force of nature and deeply fragile
Pain has something of a nostalgic quality for her. Grace and suffering are inextricably linked in her mind, that sensation of bruised flesh seems to her inseparable from the feeling of being fully alive.

One of my favourites I have so far read for the International Booker Prize 2022.
Now also longlisted for Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2022

Touching, claustrophobic at times and also loving. Violaine Huisman describes her growing up with a mother who constantly swears, smokes and badmouths the world around her, full of emotions related to chances she feels she missed out on (Maman spend her life telling the story of her life).
The first part of The Book of Mother talks about the author and her two year older sister growing up as early teenagers, at times full of resentment against their mother:
We hadn’t asked to be born to a lunatic
Also their biological father was far from normal in many aspects, visiting them every night and paying for their apartment close to the Musee d'Orsay, but for the rest largely absent:
Our concerns were less important than the rituals of our parents

Dealing with a mentally ill parent is tough, and the risk of this kind of seemingly typically French autofiction, is that the subject is either revered or refiled. Quite like compatriots Annie Ernaux and Édouard Louis, the author manages to lift the story up, and capture the complexity of parents as human beings. The mother of the girls is both clad in all YSL, they have a father growing up in the Elyssee palace and having a grandfather who founded the Cannes film festival, but she is also very course, drives like a maniac and invites random strangers in their house for fucking (Maman, who is the naked woman sleeping on the potty?)

She was excessive in everything, something that comes to a breaking point with the killing of the puppy and her being institutionalised.

The second part of the book is a depiction of how their mother became their mother. From humble working class background she is quickly noticed for her beauty. With a mother who was raped and forced to marry her rapist, always cautious, this beauty was not only convenient but also a great source of intergenerational conflict. Growing up quite isolated in a children's hospital also wasn't conducive for a personality that wouldn't care for external validation: Human contact is required to create a human being.
Psychological problems emerge and the girl is for a long time seen as damaged goods, before marrying a good but rather boring man in Marseille and building a life around a dance academy, even more impressive since the girl had uneven legs.

The allure of glamour, being blown away by the power of money, is something that breaks apart her stable and loving first marriage.
You can’t do anything without money the mother of the girls thinks, and her new lover brings her in a whole new world of opulence, sexual debauchery in swingers clubs and continuous cocktail parties. These parts of the book felt heady, as if in a rush, and as we as readers know the outcome of this episode, there is constantly tragedy lurking.
The whole rich girl being sad about life's way makes sympathy for the main character harder, but her rich husband is definitely also to be blame: He is nothing if not full of contradictions

The marathon race for social recognition takes its toll, even after a grudging acceptance in the family:
Grandmaman, with all due respect, please fuck off

So a different kind of adventure calls and some of the resources that made life easy in a way It’s so much easier to get people to fall in line when you have cash to throw at them fall away.
One can not have everything seems to be message.

A shorter third part follows, where the girls need to take care of their mother, who is without genuine friends (She already mourned her when she was alive). The celebration of her life is touching and overall I found this a strong and touching book, even more impressive being a debut.

[Elyse Walters · Rating 5 out of 5]

So beautiful- so sad - so beautiful- so sad - so beautiful- so sad - so beautifully-sad…….so beautifully written…
Emotionally affecting.
Going back to sleep…
will write a few more words soon.

Update:

“No one knows my childhood better than I do, apart from my sister, who is two years older and recalls slightly different episodes from one epic of our youth. Only one point continues to elude us; the precise moment of our mothers collapse”.
“Maman was one of the most beautiful women to have ever walked the face of the Earth,
swore all those who knew her at the height of her splendor, and her beauty was almost as fatal to Maman herself as to the men and women who feel under its sway”.

“ON THE DAY THE BERLIN wall came down I was ten; television screens all over the world glowed with images of people cheering and chanting, swarms of men and women dancing and crying and raising victory signs in front of crumbling stones and debris and clouds of dust; in France, we attended this historic event via the evening news, with fadeouts to the somber face of the anchorman, whom we’d invited to sit down to dinner with us—at least those among us who ‘were’ sitting down to dinner, who still followed that family ritual and for whom the eight o’clock news happy had replaced the saying of grace as a sort of prayer for the Republic”.
“Up to that point, I’d admired my mother blindly, rapturously. But now a shadow had fallen over her image. Maman had sunk into a depression so severe that she had been hospitalized by force, for months. After having been lied to regarding the reasons for her sudden disappearance, I was informed that Maman was manic-depressive. The words all ran together—your-mother-is-manic-depressive—a sentence pronounced by one adult or another, one of those useless grown-up sentences that only added to my distress”.

“Book of Mother”, by Violaine Huisman, is translated from French by Leslie Camhi.
Its a novel that’s written to read as a memoir.

Catherine Jacqueline Pierrette (Maman) was a dancer….mother of two daughters: Violaine (narrator), and Elsa (two years older than Violaine).

We read layers of emotional
damage — jagged edges of parent-child (heartbreaking) relationships.
Horrifically dark family circumstances turn into something different than the mere family melodrama.
It has the secrets, abuse, (although that word is never use - and like a coin- we can view two sides), marriage, marriages, divorce, extended family members, family history, behavioral and mental health issues, tragedy, neglect, betrayal, misunderstandings, understandings, guilt, loss, shame, sufferings, coming-of-age, forgiveness, ‘and’ tight bonds of love.

I finished the book speechless—wanting to bawl my eyes out.
I didn’t cry.
I was just kinda numb….and fell into a deep slumber.


A few more excerpts that spoke to me - there were others ….
but I didn’t include any that gave specific plot spoilers!!

“I started smoking at a relatively young age, stealing cigarettes from Maman’s packs. Unlike my friends, I didn’t need to hide it, Maman generously offered me her smokes, inviting me to take one from her open pack—Take one, sweetheart,
they’re for everyone”.

“As teenagers, my sister and I never spoke about Maman, or rather, about what was wrong with Maman. It was only later, much later that we discussed those childhood incidents that had most deeply marked us”.

“Once a man has found himself, there is nothing in this world that he can lose. And once he has understood that humanity in himself, he will understand all human beings”.
….a quotation from Stefan Zweig as an epigraph

[Meike · Rating 3 out of 5]

Longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2022
Violaine Huisman's debut novel is a fictionalized biography of her bipolar mother Catherine, a working class dancer and author of "Saxifrage", who married rich and influential intellectual Denis Huisman. The eccentric pair indulged in drugs and orgies, and while instable Catherine longed for security, she was also drawn to self-destructice behavior; while she declared that she wanted to be free and independent, she still tied her destiny to men. Her poor mental health resulted in suicide attempts and hospital stays, and Violaine Huisman and her sister Elsa grew up feeling responsible for their mother's survival.

Split in three parts, we first get the author's perspective on her mother as a child, then we learn about Catherine's perspective, and lastly, we hear about her passing and funeral. The image that comes together is that of two damaged, but also rather terrible people - the parents - who were a burden on their children, and I say that although it is clear that this is not the message that the author wants to convey: Violaine Huisman wants to paint an empathetic picture of her mother's sad life, a neglectful mother who was herself neglected and who suffered from a terrible mental illness that tortured her for many years. And that's the crux: It's hard to tell where her agency starts and where it ends. It's easy to imagine that Catherine had zero friends attending her funeral; it's way harder to understand what Denis Huisman must have been thinking - in the book, his decisions appear erratic.

Still, this is also and in large parts a book about the Parisian upperclass ostentatiously acting like the cliché of the Parisian upperclass (drinking and having affairs while wearing YSL), and it's not exactly interesting, but reads like a soap-opera about intergenerational trauma. This is also why this does not relate to Édouard Louis or to Didier Eribon, who both write autofiction with a political dimension as they ponder the French class system using their own example. Huisman has no political agenda, this is a deeply personal text. In Germany, one might think of Monika Helfer and her project writing about members of her family in several novels, but Helfer also has a larger frame: She illustrates Austrian and German 20th century history and how it (de-)formed her ancestors and herself.

I suppose that it must have been therapeutic to write this book for Violaine Huisman who aimed to forgive her mother, and it's not a bad text, but great literature this is not: It's not aesthetically outstanding or particularly relevant content-wise.

You can listen to my interview with Frank Wynne, jury president of the International Booker 2022, here.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Longlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize

As for the woman who had existed before giving birth to me, I had no access to her. To me, Catherine could only ever be a work of fiction. So I endowed her with my fantasy of what might have been her history, her thoughts, her choices. Of course, she had told me the story of her life in great and contradictory detail, but to give shape to her I had to imagine her, interpret her. I had to become the narrator of her story in order to give her back her humanity.

The Book of Mother is the debut translation by Leslie Camhi, of the French original, Fugitive parce que reine, the debut novel by Violaine Huisman, which won both the the Prix Françoise-Sagan and the Prix Marie Claire du roman féminin in 2018.

Violaine Huisman's father is Denis Huisman (1929-2021), who was a member of the French intellectual elite, his father in turn George Huisman, who amongst other things founded the Cannes Film Festival.

Her mother (this was her father's 3rd marriage and her mother's 2nd), Catherine Cremnitz (1947-2015), was almost two decades younger and from a very different background, ("she was never considered an intellectual, but rather, totally clueless, thoughtless, an uneducated dancer in an intellectual’s family" as her daughter has explained in interviews).

In 1979, when Violaine was 10 and her elder sister Elsa 12, Catherine was hospitalised with manic depression, after suffering a breakdown triggered by the breakdown of her third marriage, and after that she published her own life story in a book of prose poetry Saxifrage.

Within that book, Huisman has told how her mother featured a poem from Violaine which she said she received while in hospital and which was key to her mental recovery. Huisman believes she wrote the poem but in another context and at a different time, and the way her mother used the poem helped her see the value of using fiction to tell a real story, and including real facts in a fictional tale:

J’avais écrit un poème, mais pas dans le contexte qu’elle raconte dans son livre, ni à la date qu’elle dit. Elle a créé une fiction autour de ce poème. Pour moi, c’était très pertinent, très intéressant. Cette démarche m’a beaucoup interrogée, notamment le fait d’utiliser un élément du réel dans une perspective de fiction.

That, and her reflections on her mother's death over twenty years later, led to this novel.

The novel, in three parts, is narrated by a character called Violaine. The first opens:

On the day the Berlin wall came down, I was ten; television screens all over the world glowed with images of people cheering and chanting, swarms of men and women dancing and crying and raising victory signs in front of crumbling stones and debris and clouds of dust; in France, we attended this historic event via the evening news, with fadeouts to the somber face of the anchorman, whom we’d invited to sit down to dinner with us—at least those among us who were sitting down to dinner, who still followed that family ritual and for whom the eight o’clock news had replaced the saying of grace as a sort of prayer for the Republic. I could tell, by the way the pitch of the anchorman’s voice fell, that something serious was going on, yet despite his explanations, the geopolitical significance of all this chaos was entirely lost on me. I had no idea of the issues at stake. Still, I was transfixed by the footage, riveted to our television set, in which I discerned—past the glare of the screen, among the ruins, the debris, the rubble—traces of my mother: her mangled face, her scattered body parts, her ashes. Up to that point, I’d admired my mother blindly, rapturously. But now a shadow had fallen over her image. Maman had sunk into a depression so severe that she had been hospitalized by force, for months.

Violaine tells of both what she remembers of her life with her mother, Catherine, before these events (including the separation from Violaine's father 5 years earlier) and the aftermath of her mother's breakdown, when Violaine and her two-years-older sister Elsa essentially become their mother's carer. Catherine is a volatile character to say the least and not a typical parent:

Oh fuck off! was one of my mother’s refrains, as was ordering us to go fuck ourselves or to fucking leave her alone, to stop fucking around, to understand that she didn’t give a fuck about our little moral dilemmas or the concerns of a couple of spoiled brats. Oh will you please fuck off! Who gives a shit about your stupid problems! Maman’s diatribes didn’t build to that climax—that was their starting point. My sister and I were so often subject to her harangues that from the opening notes, we’d avoid looking each other in the eye; we’d look at our feet instead. Let her have her say, above all, don’t look up—that was our rule. And no laughing, not even when her tirades became extravagant to the point of hilarity, to the point where we had to pinch ourselves to keep from giggling. We’d try to appear contrite, repentant, even when she’d hit us with the clincher, the craziest line of all: You do realize, don’t you, that I wiped your asses for years! That sentence, a classic in her repertoire, amounted to proof positive that the woman was nuts. How could we take such a declaration seriously? We hadn’t asked for any of this, above all, we hadn’t asked to be born to such a lunatic! The expression served to remind us that, in fact, we weren’t responsible for all of her suffering. These speeches, always delivered with the same feverish indignation, all began more or less the same way:

You self-righteous little shit, if only you knew how much I’ve done for you! You ingrate! You can’t even begin to suspect the number of sacrifices I’ve made for you and your sister. Who are you to judge me for my lapses? Do you know anyone who’s perfect? Who? Just who do you think you are, you sanctimonious little cunt? You do realize, don’t you, that I wiped your asses for years? No, obviously not. Well, I couldn’t care less about your stupid drama. Deal with your own shit, for once. And we’ll see who comes crying for help after you’ve finally managed to do me in. I do what I can, get it, I do the best I can, and if that’s not enough for you, have a look around to see if you can find a better mother. In the meantime, Maman does what she can, Maman is sick and tired, Maman has had it up to here, and Maman is a human being, by the way, and Maman says: Fuck off!

In fact, at the time we didn’t realize that for Maman to have changed our diapers, to have wiped our asses, wasn’t something to be taken for granted. For Maman, being a good-enough mother didn’t come naturally. Given the course of her life, her illnesses, her past, when faced with an infant’s incessant demands, with the mind-numbing work and emotional upheavals of motherhood, with the identity crisis that becoming a mother had entailed for her, she could only respond violently, unpredictably, and destructively, but also with all the love that was missing from her own childhood and that she dreamed of giving and receiving in return. That insane love, that almost intolerable passion for and from two brats who were annoying at almost every age; that boundless love that would outlast everything, transcend everything, forgive everything; the love that led her to call us (when we weren’t little shits, or bitches, or cunts) my adored darlings whom I love madly—that love kept her going for as long as she could.

And amongst the scandal, and humour, of the story, the last part of this quote is key - Catherine's own mental health issues and bipolar behaviour rooted in the issues of her own childhood and her life before she had her children:

Maman’s tragedy, the one she never recovered from, the scratch on the record that caused her to repeat herself, endlessly, was the emotional neglect she had suffered in her own childhood.

The second part of the novel is Huisman's attempt to imagine that story, told in a rather hectic present tense. If the first part of the novel is only lightly fictionalised (Huisman has said it is based on real events, but tidied for fictional coherency), the 2nd is, as the quote which opens my review suggests, a purer work of fiction, a fantasy of what might have been her history, her thoughts, her choices. Notably even the character's father becomes a different man, Antoine, although from a similar background to Denis Huisman.

We, and the narrator and author, come to understand how Catherine became, or might have become, the person she is.

Catherine thinks about Serge, her bastard of a father, and she re-traces her fight, her battle as a child, her struggle to survive, the head physician at Necker, and then the abusive grandfather, who beat Granny and whipped her black and blue, and Henri, who had no balls, who never defended her, who'd never take her side even when he knew that her mother was wrong, and Paul, who wasn't up to it, Paul, who didn't keep his promise, Paul, who let her go even though he'd sworn he'd keep her forever, and Antoine, that scumbag, Antoine who'd destroyed her in the end, and the last one, Ducon, Mr. Asshole, Ducon, fuck me! For the third time, she'd taken her husband's name. Who goes around calling themselves Ducon? Seriously, Catherine, you were a bit slow, not the sharpest knife in the drawer, to marry a man named Asshole! Duh. What a dumb bitch. Were you at the back of the line when God gave out brains, my poor Catherine? Who gets it wrong so many times? Who, except for you? How did you manage that, you poor dear? And how are you going to get out of all this shit now?

The third part of the novel brings us closer to the present day, with Violaine (author and character) living in New York and learning of her mother's death.

The poem, including in Saxifrage, which triggered the novel plays a key role in all three parts of the story and it was fascinating from his conversation between the translator and author to learn that the translation of the poem in the English edition was assisted by Huisman's own daughter, aged 8 and fluent in English and French, in order to capture the voice of a child.

But another text also plays a key role in Violaine (the character)'s understanding of her mother. The epigram to Saxifrage was taken from Stefan Zweig, and after her mother's death Violaine is led by her mother's bequest to the source of the quote, the closing words of the 1922 story Phantastische Nacht, and her reading of that story (the German original and an English translation can be found here) leads her to reinterpret the meaning of the quote and realise how key it was to her mother's life credo:

Wer einmal sich selbst gefunden, kann nichts auf dieser Welt mehr verlieren. Und wer einmal den Menschen in sich begriffen, der begreift alle Menschen.

Once a man has found himself, there is nothing in this world that he can lose. And once he has understood the humanity in himself, he will understand all human beings.

Fascinating, powerful and a strong shortlist contender.

[Roman Clodia · Rating 4 out of 5]

An intense and extreme book which I suspect readers will either love or hate: there's not much room for prevarication with this one. I'm in the love camp though I'd have to admit that the text is uneven.

The first section is the strongest as 'Violaine' describes her childhood from the time her mother is forcibly placed in a psychiatric hospital suffering from manic depression. Huisman captures a child's confusion as to why her beloved mother has been taken away, and also succeeds in showing us how the effects of her mother's mental instability shape the wayward, unstable mother-daughter relationship. From passionate adoration to reckless abuse, the spectrum of emotions oscillate radically.

The second section switches to become a fantasised 3rd person narrative of Catherine, the mother's life, full of what have become almost trademark feminist markers: rape, abuse, sexual objectification, something that is almost incest, bloody abortion, unplanned pregnancy, all of which work as attempts to explain, at least in part, what makes Catherine the way she is. This section is nicely ambiguous as we're not sure to what extent it is based on objective reality as opposed to the fictionalised imaginings of 'Violaine'.

The third section return to 'Violaine' as adult and ties up the book with a more mature assessment, intellectually and politically-informed, of her mother's life. Especially notable here is the importance of extremes captured in the French title Fugitive parce que reine which is erased in the English The Book of Mother. Catherine is someone whose very brilliance, whose vividness and singularity, who inspired such passionate devotion and love in her daughters, is the flipside of her restless, reckless, emotional and mental volatility.

It's worth noting that I read this in French but that flipping through the English edition, I noted two instances (there might be more) where the translation skips sections of the original, in both cases extended figurative sentences that expand on descriptions of Catherine's emotional states:

p.2 'Ou si, ça voulait dire que maman pouvait monter dans les tours, des tours que je visualisais aux angles d’un château fort, des donjons, au sommet desquels j’imaginais maman grimper à toute allure, et d’un bond plonger au fin fond des cachots ou des catacombes, enfin là où il faisait froid et humide, là où ça puait la mort.'

p.50 'Mais l’extase ne saurait durer. Le propre du ravissement est de se manifester dans l’éphémère, au point culminant de l’effusion et de l’effervescence, au paroxysme d’un élan qui ne peut se maintenir en lévitation permanente, il faut bien atterrir, et dans la vie il y a des hauts et des bas, on ne peut pas tout le temps rester perché sur les cimes de l’orgasme. Maman ne connaissait pas la descente en douceur, la piste verte n’existait pas dans son domaine skiable, au mieux elle était rouge incendie, au pire noire extinction.'

The effect is that the English translation is more terse with some of this metaphorical substance stripped down.

Emotive, sensitive and disturbing.

[nastya · Rating 2 out of 5]

I can’t believe that this novel was under 300 pages.

Part 1: The strongest one, the author’s recollection of growing up with mentally ill abusive mother.

Part 2: The author’s fantasy about her mother’s life before she became her mother. This part was so uninspired and boring, it felt like it would never end. A story about an abused girl being self-destructive in the world of extreme wealth and excesses without adding anything new to it. And the fascinating damaged woman from the first part became insufferable. Unfortunately, the story could never manage to bounce back again for me. While she was trying to explain and justify her mother's abusive behaviour, her mother became a stereotype, and the justifications just didn't work. I'll call it a "Shuggie Bain problem", when the author is blinded by their unconditional love for their mother and completely fails in creating an interesting character for the outsider who doesn't know the real complicated human behind them.

Part 3: Suddenly we have a feminist analysis of her mother that came out of nowhere. A very long story of her mother’s funeral. Sentimentality.

Passionate debut that left me cold. Also is this supposed to be a work of fiction?

*Read because of the International booker prize nomination

[But_i_thought_ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading this book feels like sitting down with someone to hear their whispered confessions — between sips of wine — on the deepest, darkest, most sensational aspects of their family history.

Huisman’a novel-memoir centers on her mother, Catherine. Catherine is a larger-than-life figure: preternaturally beautiful, glamorous, tortured, magnetic, with an “omnipresent, ostentatious sexuality”. Seduction by a wealthy politician leads her into a life of opulence, excess and hedonistic pleasure. But Catherine also harbors a dark side:

“The labels or pathologies one might apply to Maman were not in short supply: alcoholism, schizophrenia, mythomania, kleptomania, and by turns neurasthenia or hysteria. She could become overexcited or crushed, she could eat like a bear or a bird, she was excessive in everything.”

Part I of the book chronicles Huisman’s extensive mother-damage. It reminded me of Shuggie Bain and the complicated love, not unlike Stockholm’s Syndrome, that a child holds for an abusive parent. Huisman is not afraid to expose it all. She includes details — some intimate, some bizarre, some salacious — that many a writer would prefer to skip over. At times the text feels almost too raw, like a diary entry or a private transcription of pain.

In Part II, the narrative pivots and tells Catherine’s own story — her violent conception, her early abandonment to a children’s hospital, her disastrous relationships, her mounting addictions. It becomes increasingly clear that Catherine’s behavior is a reaction to that which has come before. And it is this generational trauma, this tortuous cycle, that Huisman and her sister try to escape by leaving home as soon as they come of age.

Part III returns to Huisman’s story and was for me the weakest and most sentimental. In my opinion, the author does not go far enough — wide enough with her gaze, deep enough with her analysis, creative enough with her storytelling — to unlock the full thematic potential of her story. The novel instead gets stuck in the idea of “mother-as-celebrity” and the chronicling of events around a figure the audience is presumed to be as enamored with as the writer.

Final verdict: An imperfect novel-memoir on generational trauma, that stuns and shocks, but doesn’t quite transcend the limits of personal mythology. I can’t quite shake the nagging feeling of having consumed episodes of (engrossing) family drama rather than a work of literary fiction.

Mood: Confessional
Rating: 7.5/10

Also on Instagram.

[Matthew Ted · Rating 3 out of 5]

45th book of 2022.

A strong joke at my university, and I later learnt, almost everywhere, is the mantra, Show don't tell. How they beat us over the heads with it. Yet, as it turns out, show don't tell, though gospel for us new writers, is hardly a concern for the experienced. This is a novel of telling. There are almost no scenes, no dialogue. It is all told to us through our narrator in the first and last part, and reported in the detached third person in the middle; but the mantra should have been listened to, because this novel is quite dry. At only 200 pages it feels closer to 300: the telling drags and drags. The voice isn't anything special, it's not like Holden Caulfield is telling us these things, it's Violaine. Once again, the 'modern' fixation with autofiction strikes again. This novel came into fruition after Huisman had a discussion with novelist Ben Lerner. I guess Huisman and Lerner were talking about the former's mother and here we are, the portrait of a wild mother, who hits her children, has affairs, drinks, takes drugs, and gets thrown into sanatoriums.

The first part involves Violaine (we'll imagine her as a character, I don't know how Violaine she really is) describing her childhood with her wild mother. Then the middle part follows Catherine (her mother) in the third-person, as Violaine writes at the end of Part I, 'I had to become the narrator of her story in order to give her back her humanity.' Key to the story no doubt, but I was more interested in Violaine's relationship with her mother than her mother's own story. That's the interesting thing about fiction, wherever we are thrown in, we latch, limpet-like, to who we perceive is our 'main character', and feel cheated when we are taken from them. If the roles were flipped and the first Part had us in Catherine's head and the second part then detailed her daughter's childhood, we would feel restless to get back to the mother (we don't care about the daughter!). So the middle part felt like a distraction. The final part then brings us back to Violaine's perspective but, alas, only for about 30 pages to the end of the novel. She details her mother's death and it is handled well, despite the telling, and bagged the 3-stars over a 2. Admittedly, considering the novel as a whole, the middle section about her mother's life is probably well imagined because it gives her lifetime some weight. The whole point of the novel, it appeared to me, was that strange realisation we have that our parents are not just our mothers and fathers, but people who have lived lives as we have. That before, they were the protagonists of their own stories, which the middle part quite (I now want to say, quite rightly!) demonstrates. Catherine has her humanity because she isn't just a mother through the eyes of her daughter, she is her own woman at the centre of the novel.

This was on the longlist for the Man Booker International but hasn't made the shortlist. I'm fine with that. I'm glad I read it though, having read so much Proust recently, it was nice to read some contemporary French lit. Though, I saw Proust in several instances, particularly one passage about Violaine waiting for her mother to kiss her goodnight, straight out of Swann's Way, it seemed.

[Books with Brittany]

Excellent.

[Bianca · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5
I finally finished a novel, my reading mojo has been at its lowest.
This book centres on the matriarch of a small family. Catherine is fabulously attractive but she's also moody and too much. She's got some major mental health issues. When you learn about her upbringing in post-war France, you get it.
There are family secrets and shame, love and loathing.

This novel was structured in three parts. The first is told in the first person from one of the daughters' point of view as children. The middle part is a short biography of Catherine, it's about her upbringing, her relationships, and her mental health issues. The last part is narrated by the now-adult daughter who hears about the mother's death. That last part allows us to catch up with the last twenty years of Catherine's life.

This is a good debut novel, worth checking out, especially since it's not long.

[Ruben · Rating 5 out of 5]

4,5 - I read this due to it being longlisted for the International Booker. I hope it makes the shortlist. It's in the French tradition of autofiction that I find infinitely fascinating and that has become one of my favourite genres in recent years - Carrère, Ernaux etc.

It is a very moving portrait in three parts of Violaine Huisman's manic-depressive mother. The first part is a memoir of Violaine's childhood, the second a fictionalised account of her mother before she became a mother, and then a final third part of her mother's death. I found all three parts compelling, especially the first because it was so realistic and vivid.

[Yaprak · Rating 3 out of 5]

2022 Uluslararası Booker Ödülü’nde uzun listeye kalan Annenin Kitabı üç bölümden oluşuyor. Otokurmaca olan bu eserin ilk bölümü yazar Violaine Huisman'ın çocukluğunu anlatıyor. Akıl hastanelerinde tedavi alan, iki kızına oldukça zor ve sorunlu bir çocukluk yaşattığını gördüğümüz annelerini Huisman'ın anlatımıyla dinliyoruz.

''Catharine benim için sadece bir fikir, soyut bir kavram, en iyi ihtimalle yabancı olabilirdi. Beni doğurmadan önce var olan kadına erişme ihtimalim yoktu. Benim gözümde Catherine asla bir kurgu karakterden öteye geçemezdi. Ben de hikayesinin, düşüncelerinin, seçimlerinin neler olabileceğine dair kendi fantazilerimi ona yakıştırıyordum. İnsanlığını iade etmek için benim de onun hikayesinin anlatıcısı olmam gerekiyordu.''

Bu sözlerin ardından ikinci bölümde Catherine karakterinin hayatını dinliyoruz. Tıpkı bir kurgu karaktermiş gibi Violaine annesi Cahterine'e bir hayat veriyor. Yalnız bırakılan çocukluğunu, hayatına giren erkekleri en ince detayına kadar anlatıyor. Babasını, annesi ve babasının arasındaki sıradışı ilişkiyi de keza.

Üçüncü bölümde ise Violaine olarak aramıza, okuruna geri dönüyor.

Çok spoiler verdiğimi, bu detayların okuma zevkinizi baltalayacağını düşünmüyorum. Ben otokurmaca okumaktan keyif alan bir okurum. Annie Ernaux, Edouard Louis gibi yazarların anneleriyle olan ilişkileriyle hesaplaşmalarını da keyifle okudum daha önce. Fakat bu kitaptaki anne-kız ilişkisinin toksikliği, Catherine'in sorunlu ve acınası yaşamı beni rahatsız etti sanırım. ''Bu ne kadar güzel anlatılmış bir otokurmaca!'' değil de akıl sağlığı yerinde olmayan bir kadının kendi hayatına verdiği zararlar ve kızlarına ya��attığı travmalar olarak okudum. İlginç ancak etkileyici bulmadığım bir kitap oldu açıkçası. Ama şimdiden çoğu insanın ''Çok etkilendim.'' diyerek paylaşacağını öngörüyor ve bir yerden de anlıyorum. Ama ben pek anlaşamadım diyeyim.

[Lolly K Dandeneau · Rating 5 out of 5]

via my blog: https://bookstalkerblog.wordpress.com/
𝑶𝒏𝒍𝒚 𝒐𝒏𝒆 𝒑𝒐𝒊𝒏𝒕 𝒄𝒐𝒏𝒕𝒊𝒏𝒖𝒆𝒔 𝒕𝒐 𝒆𝒍𝒖𝒅𝒆 𝒖𝒔: 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒑𝒓𝒆𝒄𝒊𝒔𝒆 𝒎𝒐𝒎𝒆𝒏𝒕 𝒐𝒇 𝒐𝒖𝒓 𝒎𝒐𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒓’𝒔 𝒄𝒐𝒍𝒍𝒂𝒑𝒔𝒆.

I was surprised this is a debut novel, the writing is incredibly moving, the story engaging and the emotional unrest in the children’s lives, shocking. Violaine and her sister, elder by two years, deal with the lunacy and recklessness of their parents, who have no sense of structure nor boundaries. Their mother (Catherine) sinks into severe episodes, diagnosed as manic depressive, and ‘a shadow falls’ over them all. As Violaine confides, she had admired her mother blindly, rapturously before her ‘collapse’. Their father can’t be bogged down with the full time responsibility of caring for his girls, so they are shuffled about, staying with friends, while their mother dips in and out of hospital, until the inevitable occurs and he must take them in. It isn’t long before their broken mother comes home, and the girls return to their feral upbringing. At first, after her stays where they’re left to wonder ‘will she ever come back for us,’ Violaine and her sister deal with Catherine’s semi-comatose state, listen to their maman’s tales of abuse and disturbing details about the psychiatric ward at Saint Anne’s. Forced to soothe their mother during her endless sobbing or raging tirades the girls have a formula to dissolve her fury, they live in an endless storm of unpredictability. They suffer Catherine’s parade of lovers, her disreputable friends (junkies even), her endless scenes of theater. She is always apologetic, loving at first after her mad escapades, often ones endangering her daughters the most, but she can never maintain a state of calm nor fill up on her daughters’ adoration.

They grow up far too fast, mastering survival skills like brave little soldiers in a war without reason, without a general to lead them. Papa comes and goes, filled with love and endless praises for his beautiful (like their mother), intelligent (like their father) daughters, but is just as lost as their ill mother. Praises and money can’t atone for his absences. At times, Catherine sees him as a warden or worse, a dictator ruling their lives, controlling her with his wealth but she adores him just wildly as she resents him. Mostly, he is like a God they must make sure not to displease and always display gratefulness that he has deigned to honor them with his glorious presence. Catherine’s love for their father is sealed, his education and class is ‘superior’ and something she envies, aspires to. Despite his adultery she adores him but their fights are legion. As Violaine says, it’s as if her father visits with the sole purpose of getting her mother ‘wound up.’ Who is left to deal with the aftermath? Their little girls. Neither of their parents are logical, both just as terrible with money as they are at parenting but dear Papa holds the purse strings and all the power.

Violaine manages to hide their disastrously insane living conditions at school, both she and her sister exceling. Everything they do in their lives is to make sure their mother is safe, but it is the “horror of her own history” that provides answers to the ruin. What becomes of children raised in volatile relationships, without support, who learn early on to ‘keep a low profile’ to avoid violence and abuse, which is guaranteed to occur without warning, they become adults trying to dissect the ruins that was their childhood. Worse, they have their own psychological wounds to attend to, the poisonous past has its moments of beauty and love, despite the trauma. How do you sort through the confusion, the fog of conflicting emotions? How do adults define themselves coming from wild instability? How do they unload the tragedy of their mother’s life, and the cost of loving her? What do you owe your parents, in the end? Without consent could be the title too, because so much of what happened to all the characters was out of their hands. No one would choose any of it. Trauma is a venom that seeps through the family line, Catherine’s daughters are heiresses’ to pain. With support, proper treatment, and accountability mental illness is hard enough to define and carry. This is a tale of adults who wash their hands and let the children run things. There are no boundaries, Violaine suffers her mother’s honesty, it’s impossible to remain innocent. Not even the girls pets are free of suffering. Catherine’s illness is a magnet for all sorts of admirers, while she’s young, beautiful and exciting. Her relationships, even those that uproot the girls into a new family, always end in disaster. This is how they grow up, in disturbing circumstances, suffocating in their mother’s messes, because she always makes a mess of life. The sorrow is, she stays alive for so long for her daughters- they are her reason in a world that she can’t seem to root herself fully in. Where was Papa, all this time, the ‘sane one’? Good question.

In the end, they loved their impossible mother, whose entire life was one of pain and struggle. A woman who tested and ‘wore out’ the love of everyone beloved to her. If, in the end, Catherine’s face bears the ‘traces of her past’, her girls bear the traces of their own in their souls. It’s a heartbreaking story, I read it months ago and still feel a sinking in my chest just reviewing it. Children who must step into adulthood, failed by everyone around them, violated in mind and body- it’s impossible to stomach and yet so many children do. I think too, it’s a cry for those with mental illness, who have been failed since the beginning of time and not always because, like Violaine’s father, they surrender responsibility- but because they don’t have the resources or knowledge to help. Gorgeous debut. This novel crushed me.

Publication Date: October 19, 2021

Scribner

[Roman Clodia · Rating 4 out of 5]

An intense and extreme book which I suspect readers will either love or hate: there's not much room for prevarication with this one. I'm in the love camp though I'd have to admit that the text is uneven.

The first section is the strongest as 'Violaine' describes her childhood from the time her mother is forcibly placed in a psychiatric hospital suffering from manic depression. Huisman captures a child's confusion as to why her beloved mother has been taken away, and also succeeds in showing us how the effects of her mother's mental instability shape the wayward, unstable mother-daughter relationship. From passionate adoration to reckless abuse, the spectrum of emotions oscillate radically.

The second section switches to become a fantasised 3rd person narrative of Catherine, the mother's life, full of what have become almost trademark feminist markers: rape, abuse, sexual objectification, something that is almost incest, bloody abortion, unplanned pregnancy, all of which work as attempts to explain, at least in part, what makes Catherine the way she is. This section is nicely ambiguous as we're not sure to what extent it is based on objective reality as opposed to the fictionalised imaginings of 'Violaine'.

The third section return to 'Violaine' as adult and ties up the book with a more mature assessment, intellectually and politically-informed, of her mother's life. Especially notable here is the importance of extremes captured in the French title Fugitive parce que reine which is erased in the English The Book of Mother. Catherine is someone whose very brilliance, whose vividness and singularity, who inspired such passionate devotion and love in her daughters, is the flipside of her restless, reckless, emotional and mental volatility.

It's worth noting that I read this in French but that flipping through the English edition, I noted two instances (there might be more) where the translation skips sections of the original, in both cases extended figurative sentences that expand on descriptions of Catherine's emotional states:

p.2 'Ou si, ça voulait dire que maman pouvait monter dans les tours, des tours que je visualisais aux angles d’un château fort, des donjons, au sommet desquels j’imaginais maman grimper à toute allure, et d’un bond plonger au fin fond des cachots ou des catacombes, enfin là où il faisait froid et humide, là où ça puait la mort.'

p.50 'Mais l’extase ne saurait durer. Le propre du ravissement est de se manifester dans l’éphémère, au point culminant de l’effusion et de l’effervescence, au paroxysme d’un élan qui ne peut se maintenir en lévitation permanente, il faut bien atterrir, et dans la vie il y a des hauts et des bas, on ne peut pas tout le temps rester perché sur les cimes de l’orgasme. Maman ne connaissait pas la descente en douceur, la piste verte n’existait pas dans son domaine skiable, au mieux elle était rouge incendie, au pire noire extinction.'

The effect is that the English translation is more terse with some of this metaphorical substance stripped down.

Emotive, sensitive and disturbing.

[Deborah Deuro-Naughton · Rating 2 out of 5]

As much as the story grabbed me in the beginning, it started to loose me after only a few pages in. I couldn’t help but begin to skim once I read about a third of the book and became fatigued by the repetitive narration. Yes the mother was ill. She treated her daughters viciously, treated every living thing around her as pure garbage, only to use it and toss it aside. But where is the actual story telling style? I wanted to know about these characters rather than the constant rehashing in some strange chronological order. I wanted to feel for them, but there is a big void of telling this tale. The story does not engage and allow the reader to “feel” it rather throws things in your face to shock and disgust. The problem then became I no longer cared what happened to Maman or the girls because I never felt I got to really know and care for them.

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning. Left me bereft. The cyclical nature of pain, neglect, abuse, the endless endless repeating of fucked up behavior and the hopelessness of it all. It never leaves you.

Maman's tragedy, the one she never recovered from, the scratch on the record that caused her to repeat herself, endlessly, was the emotional neglect she had suffered in her own childhood. Her mother, of course, was the one to blame. She had opened a hole in her daughter's heart by giving birth to her, and had left it gaping. Faced with her mother, Maman was an abandoned child all over again, choking up at the very sight of her. She said she felt something rising in her throat as we approached Grandma's house, she felt a lump - as if the stifled sobs of her childhood had congealed there.

[Alex · Rating 5 out of 5]

A stunning novel that I found profoundly effecting and moving, the titular character one of the most interesting I've read. A very mature look at the interaction of motherhood, marriage and mental illness.

[Susie · Rating 4 out of 5]

An authentic depiction of intergenerational trauma. The audio was very well done. Not an uplifting story by any means, but one I am glad to have listened to.

[kp_readss · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.25

U principu zaista emotivna i turbulentna prica jedne zene koja je nazalost na mene ostavila malo slabiji utisak zbog stila pisanja i blokova teksta od kojih se mozak umori.

[Sarah]

This is definitely a case of me not being in the right mood for the book I chose to pick up. Pretty much everyone else is giving this 4 and 5*, so I’m definitely an outlier. Great writing but it felt like the plot was pretty much non existent - very much character based, almost auto fiction perhaps.

[Darryl Suite · Rating 5 out of 5]

A modern tragedy.

[fióka · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ez egy autófikciós remekmű. Gyorsan beszúrom ide, hogy jobb döntés lett volna, ha a Mother helyett Maman szerepel a címben is, egyértelműbb lett volna, hogy itt egy bizonyos anyáról van szó.

Violaine könyve háromosztatú, az első a kisgyerek Violaine szemszögéből íródott, az ő kora gyermekkorát tárgyalja, egészen Maman (Catherine Cremnitz) idegösszeomlásáig és pszichiátriára kerüléséig. Ez a rész rendkívül fájdalmas, hiszen voltaképpen arról szól, hogyan semmisül meg a kvázi biztonságos háttér, hogyan nő fel nagyon gyorsan két kislány, és hogyan tartják de facto életben Mamant attól a perctől fogva, hogy hazakerül a kezelés után. A második rész Maman életrajza, talán ez a legérdekesebb, végigkíséri Maman érzelmi deficienciában szenvedő családjából való kikerülését, első férjét, szájbarágás nélkül tudunk bólintani arra, hogy igen, a szerető, támogató közeg csodákat tud művelni, aztán jön a szerelem és a második férj, Violaine és Elsa apja (Denis Huisman), teljes életmódváltás, az anyagi jólét, az extravagancia, gyönyörű ruhák, rengeteg utazás, fantasztikus lakás, Párizs, ragyogás és kiégés. Denis képtelen kitartani a feleségei mellett, Maman is bekerül a múlt idejű Huisman-ok közé, majd jön az újabb kapcsolat, csalódás, menekülési - majd öngyilkossági kísérlet. A harmadik rész a felnőtt Violaine és Elsa meg Maman viszonyáról szól. Szintézise három életnek. Megrázó, felkavaró, gyomorszorító, fullasztó, de enyhülést, megbékélést és elfogadást is hozó. Gyönyörű.

Nem szeretek összefoglaló ismertetőket írni könyvekről, nem az én feladatom, de ezt muszáj volt. A szereplőkkel való azonosulást nem nehezíti, hogy javarészt mind párizsiak (vagy azzá válnak), egy idő után relatív jólétben élnek. Időben is közel állnak hozzánk, a család- és anyatörténet a nyolcvanas évektől szinte napjainking ível, mégsem látok magyar kiadót lecsapni rá. Pedig lennne olvasótábora, ebben biztos vagyok, rengetegen magukra ismerhetnének benne, szépen megsemmisíthetne olyan közhelyeket mint pl. hogy a különböző pszichés betegségek a gazdagok körében nem aratnak. Vagy az ilyen családba született gyermekek élete kánaáni, probléma egy szál sem, legfeljebb azon kell meditálni, hogy hol nyaraljon az ember és mire költse a pénzét. Mesél szeretetről, arról, hogyan lehet túlélni egy ilyen gyermekkort, milyen az, amikor összeomlik körülötted a világ, milyen együtt élni valakivel, aki mentális betegségben szenved. Szép a nyelvezete és sallagmentesen, természetesen beszél arról, ami valójában még most is tabusított, amiről nem szívesen beszélnek az emberek vagy amit simán bagatellizálnak: a diszfunkcionális szülőkről és a mentális betegségekről. A könyvet beválogatták a 2022-es International Booker Prize longlist-jére, abszolút megérdemelten. Jó lenne, ha minél többen olvashatnák.

[Rebekah · Rating 2 out of 5]

This febrile, passionate narrative of thwarted personhood, female suffering and flawed motherhood should have been exactly up my street - I adore people like Gwendoline Riley, Violette Leduc, Rachel Cusk , all of whom write in a similar vein- but this breathless novel somehow failed to land for me. It was visceral and distressing in a way that perhaps does not lend itself to the January blues, and whilst at times I found myself gripped and appalled, unable to tear myself away, most of the time I just kept thinking 'I should give this up'. It could be a case that this was not the right time for me to read the novel, or it could be that other writers have conveyed the subject matter far better. Not a bad read, by any means, but one that I will fail to remember in time. There was only ever going to be one end to Maman's life, and the journey too bleak to consider for long. There is a lack of beauty in the narrative (i.e not enough literary beauty to redeem it as there is in Simone de Beauvoir's The Inseperables for example), which made it a slog rather than a firework going off in your mind.

[Nicky · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5*

[Barb reads......it ALL! · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing debut!

[Έλσα · Rating 4 out of 5]

Είναι από τις φορές που διαβάζοντας ένα τέτοιο βιβλίο δε νιώθεις θυμό. Αυτό που νιώθεις είναι ενσυναίσθηση και οίκτο.

Μια γυναίκα έζησε δύσκολα και απάνθρωπα παιδικά χρόνια χωρίς τη στήριξη και την αγάπη των γονιών της. Η Κατρίν προσπάθησε να δώσει όλη της την αγάπη στις δύο της κόρες παρόλο που δεν τα κατάφερνε πάντα.

Η ίδια είχε υποστεί ψυχολογική, λεκτική και σωματική βία με αποτέλεσμα να οδηγηθεί σε ένα σκοτεινό μονοπάτι γεμάτο αλκοόλ, τσιγάρο, φάρμακα που τη συντρόφευαν στην υπόλοιπη ζωή της. Έφτασε ακόμα σε σημείο να νοσηλευτεί σε ψυχιατρική κλινική.

Σου σκίζει την ψυχή η αφήγηση. Στους ήρωες διακρίνεις τα σημάδια που σου αφήνουν οι επιλογές τους και γεγονότα που βιώνουν.

Ως αναγνώστρια κατάφερα να κατανοήσω τις αντιδράσεις της γιατί είδα σε εκείνη μια αδυναμία να αντιμετωπίσει δύσκολες καταστάσεις όπως αυτές που συναντούν αρκετοί άνθρωποι στην κοινωνία. Χρειαζόταν βοήθεια.

Κανείς στην ουσία δεν μπορεί να σου προσφέρει ουσιαστική βοήθεια πέρα από τον εαυτό σου. Εσύ θα σηκωθείς από μόνος σου… θα αφήσεις στην άκρη το παρελθόν… θα αγνοήσεις τις καταβολές του σώματός σου… δε θα σκέφτεσαι πως το σώμα σου είναι βαρύ… πως τα πόδια σου δεν μπορείς να τα κουνήσεις… θα σταματήσεις να κλαις… θα πάψεις να αρνείσαι τη ζωή και θα πεις «πρέπει να προχωρήσω παρακάτω» , «είμαι καλά»
Μπορείς να τα καταφέρεις!

Τα παιδιά της δεν έπαψαν να τη στηρίζουν κ να την αγαπούν μέχρι το τέλος !

[Marcus Hobson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I bought this book after it was longlisted for the International Booker in 2022. I’ve only just got to reading it, a year later.
It is a book of three quite different sections. Part I, 78 pages, Part II 100 pages and Part III 28 pages. Part I was the standout for me because of the first-person voice, one of the two daughters at the age of ten, a contemporary narrative from deep within the conflict of family life. The second part is a third-person retrospective, which while providing many interesting and missing parts of the history, lacks the life and immediacy of the first part. The third section reverts back to a daughter narrating in the first person, but this time we have jumped forwards many years to the period immediately after the death of the mother.

The book is described as Violaine Huisman’s first novel, but throughout I kept wondering if this was really creative non-fiction. Biography. The character of ‘Maman’ is so well drawn and studied. It is only deep within the book that you learn that one of the two daughters, the youngest, is called Violaine. It would be an odd choice to place a character with the same name as yourself in a piece of fiction. This daughter has been living in New York for some years, where Huisman has lived and worked for the last twenty years.
Maman, Catherine, is such a wonderful character. She is wonderful for all her excesses; smoking, drinking, wild driving, husbands and lovers, as well as her eventual decent into mental illness. Her foul mouth and foul moods are captured by a child that loves her, which takes the edge off the rudeness and replaces it with humour. Here is an example:

Oh fuck off! was one of my mother’s refrains, as was ordering us to go fuck ourselves or to fucking leave her alone, to stop fucking around, to understand that she didn’t give a fuck about our little moral dilemmas or the concerns of a couple of spoiled brats. Oh will you please fuck off! Who gives a shit about your stupid problems! Maman’s diatribes didn’t build to that climax – that was their starting point. My sister and I were so often subject to her harangues that from the opening notes, we’d avoid looking each other in the eye; we’d look at our feet instead. Let her have her say, above all, don’t look up – that was our rule. And no laughing, not even when her tirades became extravagant to the point of hilarity, to the point where we had to pinch ourselves to keep from giggling. We’d try to appear contrite, repentant, even when she’d hit us with the clincher, the craziest line of all: You do realise, don’t you, that I wiped your asses for years! That sentence, a classic in her repertoire, amounted to proof positive that the woman was nuts. How could we take such a declaration seriously? We hadn’t asked for any of this, above all, we hadn’t asked to be born to such a lunatic!

The proximity of narrative and madness is the success of the first section. There are many short descriptions that build up the complex portrait of Catherine.

A faint odour of death lingered in Maman’s lips when she came to tuck me in at night. There were flecks of foam at the corners of her mouth; her breath had a musty smell. Her complexion had been blanched by sadness, her eyes clouded by doubt, rage, anguish, and more doubt again; her dirty blonde hair hung limp; her sharp cheekbones pressed into my still-round cheeks. Once she’d left my room the odour of her breath, laced with alcohol and pills, clung to my sheets. Her signature scents, Fidji by Guy Laroche, First by Van Cleef & Arpels, languished in the back of a closet. In the medicine cabinet, the various eaux de toilette that, before her hospital stay, she’d worn with haughty coquetry had been relegated to the last place on the shelves. Everywhere there were bottles of pills.

Catherine eventually captures the story of her own life and struggles in a book called “Saxifrage”. It charts the period from her birth to her breakdown. I loved this description of the writing when contrasted with the writer:

Maman, whose oral performances were exhaustive, endless, tried to keep her writing brief. Such concision was unlike her, it didn’t take into account the complexity of her story, its contradictions. In rereading her book, I don’t find her voice in it; the sentences – the verses – seem studied, affected. She would never have allowed herself to write as she spoke, bombastically and with delight. In my opinion this was a mistake. Her voice was so much more beautiful in its outrageousness. Restraint didn’t suit her, restraint was antithetical to her personality, whether the restraint was stylistic or syntactical.

This could explain exactly why the first part of the book is so successful and the others less so; the lack of Catherine’s voice in the later sections.
Catherine separates from the father of her two children, but he still visits every day, to see his ex-wife and his daughters. Catherine’s new partner is happy to give them space, but this has unexpected consequences:

After all, it’s Catherine who asks this guy, soon to be her husband, to leave their home when her ex comes by, so that her ex can see his daughters without his rival being in the way. The guy didn’t have to be asked twice. He has dinner and then promptly returns to his nearby office, and sometimes as a result, he gets caught up in the piles of work, and in fact yes, he comes home a bit late, the children are already asleep and his wife is too. She doesn’t question the business trips he goes on, men take business trips, men like him, who wear pin-striped suits and leather loafers and carry monogrammed briefcases. She’s completely shocked when she discovers that he’s been fucking his secretary for months already, and that it isn’t his first infidelity. She’s stunned because it isn’t at all like the portrait of the man that she’d painted for herself, the picture of the life that she thought she’d hung above her mantelpiece. But it’s not just the picture that’s been damaged, it’s the wall, the entire structure that has crumbled. She didn’t leave the man she loved, loved body and soul, to find herself fucked over by this asshole.

The portrait of Catherine’s resulting madness is both harrowing and brilliant:

Her wide-open eyes are staring at a crack that she thinks she can see opening, discharging a swarm of strange creatures, insects, nameless things, now she feels them entering her body. Please make them go away, she screams, the things, things, go away, please, make them. She can’t breathe, how will she make it, she’s not at all strong anymore, she doesn’t know how she’s going to get up, she can’t bear it anymore, how will she ever get up from so much pain. She’s in such pain. It’s too much pain! She rolls out of bed, collapses in a corner of the room, hiding from something only she can see. For fuck’s sake. Can’t you tell? I’m dying! I’m fucking dying! Now the noises are no longer words. She’s left the world of men, entered a realm beyond reason.

And fittingly in the final section we come to the extravagance of Catherine’s funeral, which she had carefully planned herself and enlisted her dutiful daughters to carry out.

Our pain had abolished all sense of proportion, all restraint – we were shameless, feral. As long as we were still working on Maman’s behalf, attempting to carry out her wishes in death, we were in some sense keeping her alive, and we would have been capable of coming to blows, we could have hit, scratched or bitten any person who tried to stand in the way of our plans.

I really enjoyed The Book of Mother, because I loved the extravagance of Catherine’s character. Larger than life, economical with the exact truth and driving on pavements to get around the traffic. So much feisty life and so much heartbreak throughout her life. Brilliantly observed.